This post is loosely a follow-up to Laura’s post from yesterday on Fan fiction, social media & chasing the numbers with quality content (Hint: Doesn’t matter). If your main goal in writing fan-fiction is getting feedback and readership, Laura’s article offers some blunt but honest advice: go for the big fandoms and ’ships. The hard [...]

Art theft.
It’s a major problem in the science fiction and fantasy art communities–and not just for the artists. It’s also a problem for those who may be looking for artwork they can use for their fandom projects, be it a website, a self-published book, a fanzine, etc. And the problem lies in how one makes [...]

Fan fiction in this case isn’t about numbers, or so many people suggest. Social media is. But social media shouldn’t be about numbers. Social media should be about having quality conversations where there is some return that you can measure from that, so numbers shouldn’t matter that much. And the fan fiction community might say [...]

So, I have recently fallen in crazy love with Last.Fm. Not only is it a great service for discovering new music, but also tracking my own listening habits, and now, I see, for examining fandom trends and looking at what connections there may be between certain anime, media fandoms and bandoms. This is possible as [...]

I had a conversation yesterday with some one doing something similar to what I’m doing. One of the things we talked about was the new power structures. He talked about it in the context of business and I talked about it in the context of fandom as it pertains to fan fiction communities. For [...]

Fans and those they fan over frequently have competing interests. This can and does inevitably set the two parties up for conflict. Unlike objects of fannish adoration, fans aren’t unified; there is no group which has networked in fandom, which has worked with fans to organize them. There is no fan group which has stepped [...]

From May 9 to May 11, I attended RecentChangesCamp 2008 in Palo Alto, California. It was a camp, conference, gathering of people who are involved in some ways with wikis. People who showed up included representatives from of Wikipedia including their CTO and a few people really involved with the organization, people affiliated with Wikia [...]

I spend an inordinate amount of time examining Fan History’s traffic patterns. Outside of marketing Fan History, it is the task to which I devote probably my most of my time. What various trackers do is interesting I love awstats because it saves so much information, produces the best list of referrers that you can [...]

Twilight fandom is mad insane. Relatively new fandom that is quickly becoming the most popular fandom on FanFiction.Net. Only eight fandoms on FanFiction.Net have more people who have written in them: Harry Potter, Naruto, Inuyasha, Lord of the Rings, Yu-Gi-Oh, Kingdom Hearts, Gundam Wing, and Dragon Ball Z. Since December 27, 2007, the fandom [...]

Yesterday, I went to SocialDevCampChicago with the goal to learn more about social media, network with people involved in the area and to have a good time. All goals accomplished. I didn’t attend as many presentations as I would have liked. I was just too busy talking to people, eating, volunteering, socializing, [...]